Even with its flaws, last year’s _Ex Machina_ perfectly capturedthe curious relationship between artificial intelligence,God and ego. . .

It’s taken me a year and a several viewings to collect mythoughts about _Ex Machina_. Superficially it looks like a filmabout the future of artificial intelligence, but like mostscience fiction, it tells us more about the present than thefuture; and like most discussion around AI, it ends upreflecting not technological progress so much as human egos.

Artificial intelligence is one of the most narcissisticfields of research since astronomers gave up the geocentricuniverse. . .

This recent cultural obsession – which deserves its own post -prompts a comment by the awestruck Caleb, afterNathan the Mad Scientist reveals his attempt to builda conscious machine and the two helpfully explain to theaudience what a Turing Test is: “If you’ve created a consciousmachine it’s not the history of man… that’s the history of Gods.”

There’s a funny symmetry in our attitudes to God and AIs. . .

For all that it preaches humility, religion holds a core ofextreme arrogance in its analysis of the world. The exact samearrogance colours virtually everything I’ve seen writtenabout the Singularity, fictional or otherwise, for decades. . .

Nathan is the epitome of a particular trope in society’s viewof science and technology; the idea that tremendous advancesare driven by determined individual heroes rather thancollaborative teams. In reality of course there’s no waythat one guy could deal with all the technology in that house,let alone find time to build gel-brains or a sentient machine. . .

He’s also the epitome of an all-too-real trope in silicon valley,a hyper-masculine denizen of a male-dominated libertarian worldwhere women are still seen as window dressing for sales booths.His robots are all ‘women’ - of course the question of whetheran AI can be female in any meaningful sense is wide open -and function as basically slaves and sex toys. To the extentthat Ava has sexuality, it amounts to a “hole” - Nathan’s word -in the right place, a feminine appearance, and a willingnessto massage male egos. . .

Nathan becomes a kind of three-part study of ego. He representsthe male ego-driven culture of the tech world. He represents thefilm’s buy-in to the idea that great egos drive great scientificadvances. And the decay of his character shows what happenswhen an ego faces the reality of its own extinction. . .====

https://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/155398989313/experts-predict-human-robot-marriage-will-be-legal--------------“AI risk” discourse correlates **extremely** closely to fearsof slave revolts and fears of feminism. in the latter case,it’s frequently literally the same people. read . . .’s fucked-up rantson feminism and change it all from “feminists” to “unfriendly ai”and see how it looks. the **visceral** fear. . .====